• Question: do you think all of your work so far has been worthwhile

    Asked by kimmie444 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 18 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      That is such a good question! I like to think so but it is hard to be sure… Everything I’ve done so far was worthwhile for me personally, but I wonder if I always made the best of it scientifically.

    • Photo: Joanna Bryson

      Joanna Bryson answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Part of the point of science is to explore things that no one knows about, but sometimes it turns out that people sort of did know but it wasn’t communicated very well, or something like that. So you might think that that wouldn’t be very worthwhile work. But it’s very hard to know when you start exactly how much value a new project or idea will have, so what matters is the *process* — the whole process is certainly worthwhile because sometimes it produces really new and interesting things.

      It’s like if you are playing football — most shots on goal are worthwhile, even if they don’t go in, because they might have done. Though sometimes you should have thought harder and passed first or let someone else take the ball. But if you are really playing your best and learning from your mistakes even those are sort of worthwhile.

    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Some things, honestly, maybe not…but what is cool about science is that you cannot know how useful something is until you’ve done the experiment to find out the answer. You can come up with a great idea, test it, find it does not work…but then sometimes you can come up with a great idea, test it, and find you get a completely different result and by surprise, you’ve discovered something really cool….some of the greatest discoveries in science (like antibiotics) were accidents like that. So all in all, I thing everything I do it worthwhile, even if not all of it works!

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